Wondering how your business meetings can be successful? By the end of this video,
I'm going to share with you my tips on how to make your business meetings more productive
and efficient. And if you stay to the end of this video, I have something very special for
you that's going to make you productive and efficient in other areas of your business.
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and project management advice, coming to you every Wednesday.
I have participated and even facilitated thousands of meetings. And over the years,
I have experienced and seen my fair share of very unsuccessful business meetings. Meetings
where they're as seen as time-wasters. So with this video, I'm going to share with you my four
business meeting tips that are going to make sure that your meetings are seen as valuable and not
wasting people's times. Let's get to it. Establish purpose, goal, and agenda.
All right. People may think that this is obvious, but surprisingly, it's not because
these are very specific things that a lot of people don't put in their meeting invites.
Let's look at the first one, the purpose. Why are you having the meeting? What is the purpose
of you bringing everyone together? If you have a clear understanding of that, and you may have
a couple purposes, you really have to know, does it make sense to combine those purposes together?
That's why it's really important to put purpose in your meetings so people understand
why they're all getting together. Your goal is, "Hey, at the end of
this meeting, what are we hoping to achieve or get out of it? What does success look like?"
So really be clear if you're getting people together to make some decisions,
you may want to put that down as your goal, that we have an answer to this activity one or two,
or decision one and two, whatever that may be. And last but not least is agenda. Yeah, yeah,
yeah. It's a given. Not, unfortunately. You really have to think about that agenda in advance.
If you we're the only one on the agenda, then I guess, you can probably
do that agenda quite close to the meeting time. But if you're bringing in other people,
then you have to give them preparatory time to do their agenda item. You then have to ensure
that the participants know exactly what's on that agenda. So you should minimum give it out 24 hours
in advance, 48 hours, more would even be great if you can. But if you can't, I would say those are
kind of the bare minimum to go with. And you want to ensure you follow it through. More importantly,
put a time associated with it. I don't know how many times, as soon as I put a time against an
agenda item, I had to rearrange my agenda all over again, even kick some things out because of that.
So to have really successful business meetings, purpose, goal, and agenda is a must.
Concentrate on the meeting. This may seem like another obvious one, but you'll
be quite surprised people don't concentrate on the meeting. I don't know how many times I've seen
people multitasking during meetings, which really is a big no-no. I also find it's interesting too,
because when we talk about meetings, we put a lot of ownership on the facilitator,
but as a participant, you have a role to play as well. And that is the concentration. So turn
off your phones, turn off your laptops if you are in live meetings. Obviously if you're in
virtual calls, you're going to need to have your laptop on, but don't start doing other tasks. It
really is disruptive to the flow of what's going on, particularly when someone calls upon you and
you're not paying attention. Why? Because you're multitasking and you're not concentrating. So yes,
it is important for the facilitator to have jobs and responsibilities and ensuring that
the meeting is set up for success, but it's also the responsibility of the participant
to participate properly by concentrating on the meeting. That's how you're going to have
successful business meetings. Discussions and Q&A.
If you're going to have a meeting, your meeting is not just to update people. In fact,
I hope you don't have update meetings. I hope you can those, or if you do have them, you just
do them like quarterly. Believe you me. There's a whole bunch of other technology to help you with
updates. So if you're together in a meeting, it really is to discuss, it's to have questions, it's
to brainstorm, it's to resolve. So you need to make sure that everyone is participating. And this
is something too for successful business meetings, I see a lot of one-sided conversations. People who
are extremely extroverted, who have an opinion, who are always the ones that are speaking.
And then there's a lot of individuals who maybe shy, more introverted, who don't speak up,
but I promise you have amazing ideas. So one of the things you can do to have successful business
meetings is ensure everyone's participation. A really good trick that I do is I usually have...
When I have a major question to be answered, or I need some input, I allow for everyone, on a piece
of paper, to write down their thoughts. I give everyone 10, 15 minutes. And then afterwards,
we go around the room or on the virtual call, we go along the windows and say, "Hey, please tell
me what you think of this." This is a great way to get great discussion, and a lot of good questions
answered when people are properly participating and you call upon everyone at the meeting.
End with an action plan. Oh, I get crazed when I go into a meeting that
I'm not running, I'm a participant. We go through everything, and then we talk about a lot of stuff,
but no one is taking notes and no one got assigned anything, but yet a whole bunch of
tasks were said that had to be done, but who owns it? When are they due? Oh my goodness.
I find this crazy that you're bringing all these important people together, and yet you're not
ending your meeting with some action item plans. I see a lot of people taking minutes on what was
said, but again, the most important part, who's going to take responsibility for the key things
that you all decided on gets left and lost. And then you wonder why your business initiatives are
not moving forward because your business meetings were really ineffective, wasting people's time.
So the biggest gift you can give to yourself is ensure that as you're talking about things and
you're coming to resolution, action needs are being addressed. Assign a person's name to it,
assign a due date, capture that. Better yet, the last five minutes of every meeting, repeat it so
everyone is very clear with the takeaway and the expectations coming out of that meeting.
Now that you know how to run a successful business meeting, good for you. I'm excited
for you because I think you're going to find tons of value. Your meetings are going to be looked at
as being effective and efficient and not wasting people's time. If you're in business meetings,
you definitely have project meetings and you want to know to ensure how your projects are
not wasting people's time. So I want you to go on the link below, download this, how to ensure
that your projects are successful. This is going to be important for you, particularly if you do
anything in the business world, because there are projects everywhere you go.
Don't forget to subscribe to my channel, like this video, and please share it with all the people
that you know. If you have some other ideas on how to have successful business meetings,
it's now your turn to share with me. Please put them in the comments below.
Until the next time I see you, see you later.